The Old Guard/Volume 1/Issue 2/Beecher Blashemy and Negro Patriotism

Henry Ward Beecher utters himself after the following characteristic fashion in the columns of the Independent:

"The interval between the destruction and the salvation of the Republic is measured by two steps: one is Emancipation; the other Military Success. The first is taken; the other delays. How is it to be achieved? There is but one answer: by the Negro!

"They (the negroes) are the forlorn hope of the Republic. They are the last safe-keepers of the good cause. We must make alliance with them, or our final success is imperiled.

"Congress is in a dispute over a bill to arm and equip 150,000 negroes, to serve in the war. Let it stop the debate! The case is settled; the problem is solved; the argument is done. Let the recruiting sergeants beat their drums The next Levy of Troops must not be made in the North, but on the Plantations. Marshal them into line by regiments and brigades! The men that have picked cotton must now pick flints! Gather the great Third Army! For two years the Government has been searching in an enemy's country for a path to victory: only the Negro can find it! Give him gun and bayonet, and let him point the way! The future is fair: God and the Negro are to save the Republic!"

This indecent amalgum of stupidity and blasphemy is entirely characteristic of the abolition party. Its leaders never let an opportunity pass to show their contempt for white men in contrast with their admiration of negroes. In this particular Mr. Beecher fairly represents his class. The President's emancipation proclamation is proof that he has no hope of military success except through the negroes. We confess that his attempts to subjugate the South by an army of white men has proved a failure. He now implores the negroes to come to his rescue. He abandons the hope of success for legitimate warfare, and tries—thank God in vain—to stir the negroes up to insurrection and murder. The negroes as a class appear to have more sense or more humanity than their bloody and brutal allies, the abolitionists. The position at last assumed by the President and his party is one of hostility to every wish of restoring the Union under the Constitution as it is. The plan of subjugation means the destruction not only of this Union, but of the present constitutional form of our government. While we are willing to risk all for the salvation of our country—for the restoration of the Union—for the preservation of constitutional liberty—we pray God that this abolition scheme of subjugating the South, and holding them as a conquered people, may never succeed. We never wish to see one half of these States subjugated by the other half—held down as their vassals beneath the hand of despotic power! We shall never relinquish the hope of bringing the revolted States back into the Union—back on the same principles and grounds of equality, on which they came in when the Union was formed—we want to see them back on no other terms. We never wish the involuntary system of Government, the despotism of the old world transplanted to the shores of new. We have not failed to denounce secession as an unjust and unauthorized remedy for the evils which the abolitionists sought to inflict upon the southern people; but, bad as it is, it is infinitely to be preferred to the Lincoln-Sumner plan of reducing one half of the States to the condition of conquered colonies, and holding them down by the power of standing armies. Perish the very name of Union rather than see it prostituted to the purposes of such a damnable despotism! However criminal secessionism was in the beginning, abolitionism has eclipsed it by the blaze of its own crimes. Under this abolition rule the war is no longer for the enforcement of the laws of the Union, and therefore we are all absolved from any further support of it—until the President returns to those objects for which the Constitution permits him to call upon the States for their troops. Lincoln and his fellow traitors are striving to make the war a conflict between the white and black race. He may succeed sooner than he expects, for the way he and his Sumners and Beechers are going on, a storm may be awakened which will end in the extermination of the poor blacks on this continent. When once the hitherto peaceable and harmless negroes shall be so far deluded by Lincoln and his fellow assassins, as to begin the business of murdering white men and women, the work of their own extermination will be quick and terrible. The Beechers and Cheevers are preparing the way for a visitation of wrath and misery upon the unfortunate blacks, which they would never experience in this country if the abolition assassins had never been born. How long will white men sit still and hear these mad-men proclaim that "the negroes are the forlorn hope of the Republic!" How long will the caucassian man allow this blasphemy to go out to the nations that "God and the negro are to save the Republic!" Already have these ravings produced their effect upon the colored people here in the North. At a late gathering in Jersey city, one of the black Beechers boastingly declared that, "as the right General had not yet been found among the white folks, a black man may be selected to lead the army." Another ebony Reverend let forth a storm of abuse and threats against the State and people of New Jersey. All the fruits of Lincoln's and Beecher's sowing. This gathering of Mr. Lincoln's black patriots wound up by proposing "three cheers for God!" which was following Beecher pretty literally. We wish that we might hope that the deluded blacks could escape the consequences of the delusions into which they are being driven by the abolitionists. We wish our unhappy country were safe from the revolution and violence which these desperate fanatics are urging forward. We wish an entreaty could prevail with the men of the South to return to the Union that their fathers and our fathers made, and help us to rescue our beloved country from the doom into which these blaspheming traitors are fast plunging it. We shall not cease to use every lawful, every honorable means to bring them back—to restore our country to what it was before the Lincoln and Beecher worms had bored into its heart.